House Votes Sweeping Changes in Clean Water Act

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

Published: May 17, 1995

WASHINGTON, May 16—
The House today approved far-reaching changes to the Clean Water Act, a powerful signal that conservatives have the votes to carry their crusade against Federal regulations into territories governed by the nation's core environmental laws.

It was the first vote in the 104th Congress to rewrite whole sections of a major conservation law, and its backers fought off almost every attempt to amend their proposal.

The legislation would give more authority to the states and more weight to economic considerations when water quality standards are set and when farmers, businesses and sewage treatment plants are told how to meet them.

The vote for final passage was 240 to 185, with 45 conservative Democrats voting for the bill and 34 moderate Republicans against it.

The losers, anticipating votes that lie ahead on proposals ranging from revising the Endangered Species Act to rewriting the Superfund law for cleaning up toxic waste sites, took some consolation in mustering a minority large enough to sustain a veto. President Clinton has promised to veto anything like the bill approved by the House today.

Representative Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the House Public Works Committee, called it "a historic environmental bill, a sound environmental bill, a balanced environmental bill."

But Carol M. Browner, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, called the bill "extreme," saying: "The House has once again passed the burden on to the Senate. I do think 34 Republicans voting no indicates, even for Republicans, a greater recognition of how extreme these provisions are."

The Senate has not yet begun to consider the Clean Water Act, and is unlikely to accept many elements of the bill that the House approved.

"We'll take up a water bill, but not that one," said Senator John H. Chafee, the Rhode Island Republican who is chairman of the Senate Environment Committee. Mr. Chafee, who has a long record of supporting environmental protection measures, said that he believes the existing water law is "in pretty good shape."

Before voting for final passage, the House today approved by a 57-vote margin a section of the bill that had been heatedly debated for days because it would strip Federal protections from most of the nation's remaining wetlands. It would rank wetlands according to their ecological value and require the Government to compensate property owners when they are not allowed to develop the most environmentally important ones.

The sponsor of that section of the bill, Representative Jimmy Hayes, Democrat of Louisiana, called it a "vote on the distinction between the rights of individuals and the arrogance and power of government."

Throughout the debate, the bill's sponsors whipped up an anti-regulatory fervor by heaping calumny on E.P.A. officials and others who set the standards, issue the permits and designate the wetlands governed by the bill.

Mr. Shuster, the bill's principal sponsor, called them an "environmental Gestapo," and asserted, "We've had about all the help we can stand from the E.P.A."

A few members took exception to that kind of strong language.

"The references to Gestapos and heavy-handed tactics by the Federal agencies fuels the gross national paranoia, which we see so much of in this country," said Representative Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. "I beg my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to temper their rhetoric and realize that some people who have violence in their hearts listen to those code words."

The bill would relax the pollution controls contained in dozens of programs under the Clean Water Act of 1972, which has been credited by both sides in the debate with reversing in a single generation what had been an inexorable decline in the health of the nation's waters since the mid-19th century.

But the proponents of change in the House, supported by a broad and powerful coalition of industry, agriculture and state and local governments, argued that enough had been accomplished and that now it was time to make the law more flexible. They maintained that officials should take the costs of compliance more fully into account when deciding how and when to achieve the law's ultimate goal: water clean enough for fishing and swimming.

Opponents have called the measure a sellout to special interest groups, which they said had first contributed heavily to the campaigns of members who support the bill and then worked closely with them to write long-sought waivers and exemptions into the language of the bill when it was drafted by the House Public Works Committee.

In an interview on Monday, Vice President Al Gore put the blame for the bill mainly on Republicans.

"The Republican leadership in the House and Senate is evidently trying to insure that this Congress will go down in history as the most anti-environmental Congress ever, and the Clean Water Act is the latest outrageous example," he said.

The bill takes some approaches similar to the anti-regulation provisions of the Contract With America, the House Republicans' 1994 campaign manifesto. A broad bill on regulations has been passed by the House but has not yet been debated on the Senate floor.

The wetlands provisions of the measure approved today, for example, include the sections providing compensation for landowners who are prevented by regulations from developing their property -- a mechanism that has already passed the House in a separate bill.

And other provisions call for the environmental agency to certify that every rule it issues "maximizes net benefits to society," the same kind of comparison between costs and benefits that the House passed in its bill on regulations.

Noting that the President has already said he would veto this bill as well as the House version of the clean water legislation, Representative W. J. (Billy) Tauzin, a conservative Democrat from Louisiana, predicted that the House would pass them again and again.

"If there is one thing the American people are sick of, it is the old politics as usual: vote for something one day and claim you were for it, then vote against it another day when it really counts," he said. "Well, today it really counts."